Koo Ki-jung asks how we perceive what we see in solo show at Gana Art Hannam

A potted plant sits inside a curved metal structure, while a monitor beside it displays a digitally rendered image of the same plant. A single plant exists in three distinct material states at once — as a living object, as data and as an image. Viewers encounter the plant from multiple angles, experiencing a gradual blurring of the boundaries between plant and image, structure and screen.

"Clearview Mechanism," a solo exhibition by Koo Ki-jung, 36, whose work explores the relationships among humans, nature and machines, runs through Oct. 25 at Gana Art Hannam in Seoul.

The show is Koo's first solo exhibition at Gana Art and was made possible through a grant from the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. It presents 12 works in total: eight light panels, one Dibond-framed installation, two video installations and one graphic sheet installation.

Through photography, graphic design, video and installation, Koo has long asked how the things we see are perceived and named. The inquiry traces back to a childhood memory of her mother calling a green traffic light "blue" — an experience that led Koo to recognize that even when two people look at the same object, the way they perceive and label it can differ depending on personal experience, language and environment.

Technology has expanded the range of human vision, but it has also become a set of conditions that determines what we see and how. Working through technology as a medium, Koo defamiliarizes familiar natural landscapes and prompts viewers to ask what conditions and processes shape the scenes they encounter.

The exhibition opens with a new work, "Transparent Visual Device." Inside a transparent steel frame, Koo arranges images of hardware components — an LED circuit board, a rendered CPU and RAM — laying bare the very conditions that produce an image.

"Overlapping Landscape" traces how a single scene is transformed into something new through successive stages of manipulation. Koo photographed natural subjects, digitally altered the images, then repeatedly zoomed in on and captured portions of the result. With each iteration, the natural forms drift further from their original appearance until they arrive at something altogether unfamiliar.

Near a window at the back of the gallery, "Overlapping Landscape: Window" takes a photographed and digitally altered image of a garden and prints it onto a semi-transparent graphic sheet, which is then affixed to the very window that looks out onto that same garden. Viewers find the original and the transformed image occupying the same field of vision at once.

The exhibition proposes that seeing clearly — "Clearview" — means more than registering what is in front of you. It means perceiving the mechanisms that had to operate for that scene to become visible at all.

Koo studied communication design at Hongik University before completing a master's degree in photography at the École cantonale d'art de Lausanne in Switzerland. Her work has been shown at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art and the Nam June Paik Art Center, and she recently contributed a large-scale video installation to the reopening exhibition at the Busan Museum of Art.